XARK 3.0

Xark began as a group blog in June 2005 but continues today as founder Dan Conover's primary blog-home. Posts by longtime Xark authors Janet Edens and John Sloop may also appear alongside Dan's here from time to time, depending on whatever.

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Monday, December 03, 2007

The Brilliant Pass at Large

Over at the Rosewater Chronicles, my friend Joshua Gunn authored an interesting essay that has haunted my thinking over the last week.While the issue he raises is specific in his account to the academy and areas of academic expertise, it’s a question worthy of all groups of “specialists,” whether they be journalists, health care professionals, waiters, football players . . . hell, it’s worthy of your attention regardless of what you do.

In his post, Gunn questions the ways in which groups of academics often offer what he calls “the brilliant pass” to those who are most successful at their area of expertise.Without naming names, Gunn points to a number of people in rhetorical and communication studies who are viewed as “brilliant” by others but who also have some decidedly reprehensible moral and ethical characteristics; they can be rude, liars, sexual predators, mean drunks, and so forth.(Mind you, Gunn is not saying that all brilliant types are also unethical, only that we give a “pass” to the brilliant ones who are).The problem, then, is that the larger group of admirers are all too willing to forgive misbehavior if we think the person committing it is “brilliant.”To the degree that we as individuals help provide the brilliant pass, we are also complicit in their behavior.

Gunn’s post haunts me to the degree that he forces me to understand the ways in which I have also been guilty of enabling ugly behavior through the allowances, the passes, I have given a number of people that I respected on the intellectual level even while privately questioning their moral behavior.It has also haunted me to the degree that it seems clear that the brilliant pass is allowed in almost every area I can imagine.We can think of numerous ways in which great athletes are given passes, in which brilliant authors’ misbehaviors are overlooked.Name an area of work or expertise, and I can almost guarantee there is a pass given for those who excel in that area.If we simply exchange the word “brilliant” with “very good at what we value in this line of work,” brilliant passes are a dime a dozen.

I suppose I’m mostly haunted by the question because I see no solution. Or, rather, no easy solution.If we think of this in mathematical terms, we all too often make the value of being “brilliant” within a given field (and/or receiving the shared brilliance by being friends with such a person) of a higher value than particular moral standards.Hence, when I encounter “iffy” behavior, the math often tells me to ignore it in this case, that sometimes that’s just the price of brilliance.

While I realize there are certain lines that we would not let our “brilliant” friends to cross (i.e., most of us would not let one commit murder or endanger a friend), in the practice of everyday life, we allow the brilliant one to be a little more rude, to lie a bit more outrageously, to act a bit more boorish, to be more emotionally harmful of others, than we do those who are simply good.Until we all learn to value basic practices of human decency over the most brilliant practitioners of our chosen fields, I don’t see a way out.

Comments

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We're all guilty, I agree. And I'm not sure there is a solution as much as a better way to manage our passing gestures. I think that better way has something to do with re-valuing the affective at the level of signification: that is, theorizing emotion's role in the domain of representation (and in the domain that eludes representation).

Hmm. I'm not sure how that "better management" translates outside of the academy. I'll have to think about it . . . but there's something about ethics here.

Yes, I do tend to accept wider variation in behavior for people who excel in some way. I've been saying for a long time: "I'll put up with a lot for competence". I don't see this as a problem. In fact, I tend to seek out this kind of person to hang out with because (as long they don't exceed some tolerance level, such as Sloop bounded with murder) they're more interesting than average.

On a broader perspective, "brilliance" is remarkable because it's rare. I'm going to call all those things Sloop was talking about (positive and negative) as "social conformance". Leaving aside how much more examined "brilliant" people are than average people, I'll note that social conformance doesn't seem to be completely universal, either even amongst the non-brilliant.

So, if we demand our "brilliant" people to also be socially conformant, we're going to ignore a sizable portion of our "brilliant" people who could otherwise make us some good mileage towards some goal (e.g. Special Relativity, the largest airplane of it's time, etc, etc) that is socially beneficial.

As you start adding more and more requirements to *anything*, from cars to people, you start making them more rare and therefore more expensive. At some point you have to realize that you've added so many constraints that some really valuable things aren't passing your standards.

So, I think part of this tolerance is a recognition that it really is worth it, in general, to accept some things we otherwise wouldn't in order to get the benefit of the brilliance.

There are, of course, plenty of societies where conformance is valued more then exceptional capability. As a wise young man recently remarked to me: "Those people aren't my tribe."

At the highest level, historically brilliance seems to be strongly correlated with changing the status quo -- i.e. not being socially conformant for whatever society they're in. I'm not sure if this is cause or effect, or if there is some minor kind of "insanity" responsible for both.

Perhaps most "brilliant" people spend so much time and energy being brilliant that they don't have time left to be polite. I call your attention to this essay.

I am pretty sure that if we require our "brilliant" people to be just like everyone else socially, instead of ending up with polite geniuses we'll end up with very few brilliant people and we'll miss them.